


A Premature Burial

by WerewolvesAreReal



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Does this count as character death, Gen, healing factor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 07:37:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13736211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WerewolvesAreReal/pseuds/WerewolvesAreReal
Summary: Logan is buried alive.Very alive.





	A Premature Burial

They gut him before they do it.

Bullets, see, bullets are a nice part of the changing times. Most people don't think that way, but it's true. Bullets are small and quick and light. They pinch through the skin, a fast second of damage, and they're out. They're clean, usually. Sometimes they get stuck. Ripples of force shudder through muscle, bone, splintering cartilage into fragments. But it's all localized. The damage is contained.

It's easy to heal. Knives, swords, fire, electric currents, even drowning – these things hurt. These take time to recover from. But Logan, who can blink through half a dozen headshots and keep walking, isn't so bothered by a world of guns.

Now. Knives.

No one usually fares well with him in close-quarters. But knives can do more damage. It can take longer to heal from having your flesh mangled and twisted with a knife. Sometimes, it takes long enough for more damage to happen.

They stab him sixty-three times. They slash open his stomach. Tear out his intestines.

When he dies the first time they start digging. When he revives, roaring, they stab him in the eyes and find a long-knife. They stick it through his throat and use this to pin him to the ground.

It's slowly pushed out as he heals. But it stays there long enough.

He wakes up underground, running out of air.

“Hell,” Logan says, slamming his arms against the pine-wood lid of his coffin. “Talk about a premature burial.”

* * *

 

He is not six feet underground.

This is the usual custom and one he has encountered before, because of course Logan has been killed before. Of course. Being buried is less common because his healing factor is mercifully quick, and usually Logan comes roaring back to life before anyone can approach him with a shovel. But six feet – he knows there should be six feet of dirt. He knows what six feet of dirt feels like.

This is not six feet of dirt.

His muscles bulge out as he pushes against the coffin lid. There is no room to properly maneuver. The lid stays tightly fastened. For killers these people used a good coffin.

Then again, they saw him rise back up – saw him take a knife to the gut and keep going. Maybe they knew something. Or maybe they just wanted to be thorough.

The air starts to get heavy soon, and Logan knows he doesn't have long. Finally, with a huff of impatience, he unleashes his claws. They pierce through his knuckles with a brief sting of pain – he barely notices this, and certainly doesn't notice the drops of blood added to his drenched form.

His claws scrape through the wooden cover and cold dirt showers down against his face. Logan pushes up his claws and the trickle turns into a cascade. He holds his breath and starts to push.

He's still pushing when his air is used up and his vision starts to blacken over with dark spots.

* * *

 

Logan comes awake. Dies. Wakes. Dies.

Through a muddy haze he pushes through the soil with his clawed hands. Seconds of furious digging, and then his hands fall limp. He lives, wakes, finds the removed soil has been replaced swiftly. He digs again. Dies again.

Logan can't remember what he did to get here. Wet earth crawls down his throat; he chokes on it, on the small, wiggling things burrowing around his teeth. He crunches down on hard gravel and opens his mouth to spit. More dirt rushes in.

In between deaths Logan digs upward. It's a ceaseless blur of shifting hands, hurt, gray fog. And then eventually he stops, exhausted, and hovers in a state of blank exhaustion. Nips of pain shiver over his body. Insects feeding. It could be an hour, a day, a year. At some point Logan thinks, _I'm underground,_ with a delirious surge of remembrance, and he pushes feebly up.

He thinks he's digging up. Maybe he isn't. Maybe he'll stay here, digging forever, until the earth bursts apart and there is only Logan, dying again and again in space until he passes into the nearest star. And finds new, more exciting ways to burn, quite possibly.

The thought is horrifically galvanizing. Logan twitches his fingers one at a time, slowly, painfully creating spaces and wiggling his way up. At some point he vomits, except his mouth is still blocked and filled with soil. Which is to say that he chokes and gags and dies even sooner. The rancid taste on his tongue doesn't quite fade, but eventually it's replaced with the taste of blood, which is somehow a bit better.

Light breaks through the earth, and this time, Logan smiles before he dies.

* * *

 

At Xavier's School for the gifted, the front doors fly open and crack against the mansion's paneled walls. Slowly a shape trudges through the entrance; huge, dirt-covered, and dripping with blood and other questionable materials, a familiar face stumbles inside, then pauses to flick a giant worm off his shoulder.

Students and teachers alike gape at him.

“Thanks for the help,” says Logan flatly. He shakes himself over the doorway like a dog, flinging mud and dried blood over the floor, and lumbers up the stairs.

If there is a way for Logan to get properly drunk, he's finding it _tonight._

 


End file.
